Trump shooting blame game lays bare America’s bitter political divide

They also heap more fuel onto the fire in a political atmosphere that has long been tense and fiercely polarised.

“Heated rhetoric has come from both sides” in recent years, said Michael Bailey, a political-science professor at Georgetown University.

Republicans, for whom gun rights and a rejection of alleged government overreach are key themes, “have been more prone to marry such rhetoric with imagery related to guns”, Bailey noted.

Trump later mocked the Pelosis, and stoked further conspiracy theories around the assault.

“Democrat leaders have been fuelling ludicrous hysteria that Donald Trump winning re-election would be the end of democracy in America,” he said.

“For years, and even today, leftist activists, Democrat donors and now even Joe Biden have made disgusting remarks and descriptions of shooting Donald Trump,” Trump campaign adviser Chris LaCivita charged on X.

Biden did recently tell donors that it was “time to put Trump in the bullseye”, according to comments put out by his campaign – though he was speaking in the context of focusing the party on beating Trump.

Representative Mike Collins went further on the shooting, stating “Joe Biden sent the orders”, without offering credible evidence.

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, meanwhile, offered an escalation of her own, telling her followers “we are in a battle between good and evil” and casting Democrats as “the party of paedophiles” and “violence”.

“The Democrat party is flat out evil, and yesterday they tried to murder President Trump,” she said.

Such accusations risk removing “attention from the very welcome, widespread condemnation of the attack”, said Jacob Ware, a research fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

The heated rhetoric pushed Biden to issue a rare address to the nation from the Oval Office on Sunday in which he called on Americans to “lower the temperature”.

Trump and Biden have spoken to each other after the incident, while Biden’s campaign is temporarily pausing television ads – part of what some on both sides hope is part of a broader national cooling.

“Tensions are high on both sides, and I think we’ve got to tone down the rhetoric,” 60-year-old Trump supporter Martin Kutzler said in downtown Milwaukee, where the Republican convention is set to open Monday.

Republican National Committee chair Michael Whately meanwhile declined to speculate on the shooting while speaking to Fox News Sunday.

“Right now, I think everybody in America needs to stop. They need to pause,” he said.

Among elected officials, though, the accusations keep coming.

“When the message goes out constantly, that the election of Donald Trump would be a threat to democracy, and that the Republic would end, it heats up the environment,” said House Speaker Mike Johnson.

Depoliticising the shooting, however, is essential, Bailey said.

“In an environment with so many guns … it is possible for heated rhetoric to motivate an unbalanced person on any side.”

In their remarks on Sunday, both Trump and President Biden counselled calm and unity, aiming to lower temperatures.

“There is no place in America for this kind of violence, for any violence ever. Period. No exceptions,” Biden said in a televised address from the Oval Office in the White House on Sunday.

“We can’t allow this violence to be normalised,” he said. “The political rhetoric in this country has gotten very heated. It’s time to cool it down.”

A grateful Trump was in Milwaukee on Monday to make final preparations for the Republican presidential nomination later this week after narrowly escaping the assassination attempt that he said presented an opportunity to bring the country together.

“This is a chance to bring the whole country, even the whole world, together. The speech will be a lot different, a lot different than it would’ve been two days ago,” Trump told the Washington Examiner on Sunday.

“I want to try to unite our country,” the New York Post reported Trump saying during the same interview, conducted during the flight to Milwaukee. “But I don’t know if that’s possible. People are very divided.”

Additional reporting by Reuters